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When Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire first met 30 years ago she was selling tickets at a London theatre where he was producing a well-reviewed but financially catastrophic play.

"He used to come to the box office to see if there was any life in the show," Squire recalls.

"We were watching this lovely piece dying but he used to buy us all gin and tonics and rally the troops. He has this fantastic team spirit."

Taking centre stage: Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire at the Duke of York

Their lives have improved since the flop that was Patricia Routledge in CP Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang at the Queen's. They ended up working together, falling in love, buying their first theatres and marrying.

And this week, in a dramatic coup against reportedly much bigger rivals, they expanded their theatrical empire with the £90 million purchase of ­venues including the homes of The Lion King and Wicked from the Live Nation concert promoters.

Greg Dyke, a friend and previous investor, was one of those who worked with them on the deal and has been named executive chairman in the new business.

Frontline: War Horse is now an Ambassador show

In a stroke, the Ambassador Theatre Group became arguably the biggest in the country with a total value of £150 million.

They own 39 venues, with most of the new ones outside London from the Edinburgh Playhouse — the biggest theatre in the country — to the Old Fire Station in Oxford, and a total workforce of 3,500 people.

Their current productions range from Calendar Girls at the Noel Coward to Woman in Black at the Fortune and War Horse at the New London Theatre.

And for the first time they have two of the very biggest London theatres suitable for blockbuster musicals, the kind of venues that have made the fortunes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, notably when they have produced their own work in them.

Is the Ambassador really the biggest theatre company in Britain? Panter says they really do not know. "It depends how you count it," Panter says. Yes, in terms of seats. No, in terms of the wealth.

Boost: Kelly Brook in Calendar Girls

But they are certainly thrilled, if exhausted.

"For the last few months, we've only had a few hours sleep a night," Panter says. The deal was "very competitive and very complicated" and so much bigger than anything they could have expected when starting out.

Howard Panter, 60, grew up in Australia and Beaconsfield and was educated at a "Gordonstoun for thickies" in Dorset where his only exam success was in art because no one recognised he was dyslexic.

From there, he studied production at Lamda, the drama college where he now serves on the development council, going on to direct for the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company and, eventually, producing.

Squire, 53, grew up in Nottingham where her early theatrical experiences were watching plays directed by Richard Eyre then running the Playhouse, before studying languages at Southampton University and working in the box office and accounts at the Mayflower Theatre in her spare time.

It was after graduation in 1979 that she met Panter in London on another holiday job before heading for America and postgraduate study. It was not Panter to whom she turned but the literary agent, Alan Brodie, whom she married.

She resumed working in theatre, gave birth to her first daughter, Jenny, now 23, who has Down's Syndrome, and was pregnant with Dan, now 22, when she was made redundant. Panter snapped her up as general manager for his production company, then called Turnstyle.

At the time he was developing a theatre for the new shopping centre in Woking with the property developer brothers, John and Peter Beckwith.

It opened in 1992, but the Beckwiths quickly wanted out and Panter and Squire suffered "three years of struggle" to raise the cash to take the venue on themselves.

They did this on 1 December 1995, the same day as they exchanged contracts on the Ambassadors theatre in London, adding both to the Duke of York's which they had already purchased for £3.5 million on the back of a successful run of Carmen Jones at the Old Vic.

"I had no money," Panter said, denying any suggestion of personal wealth. But early on he met Sir Eddie Kulukundis, the Greek shipping businessman and theatre producer, who became an investor alongside the Beckwiths.

The rest was "mates and family and whatever we could scrape together", he says. "And a bank loan. We raised money to buy theatres in the same we used to raise it for productions. We ran around town trying to find people to support the idea."

From then on, the Ambassador Theatre Group bought theatres when it could, combining that with producing its own work, later supporting the producer Sonia Friedman — whose recent productions include A View from the Bridge and Arcadia — as a subsidiary of the business.

A big step was the purchase of theatres from Associated Capital Theatres in 2000 with support from ITV and American backers, AREA Property Partners, who remain major ­investors. "We became more of a grown-up company then," Panter says.

But they had always been well-run, he adds, a characteristic they believe appealed to Live Nation. "We all know it's about what happens on the stage but we take the business side of theatre very, very seriously."

Their working partnership had become a professional one early on after Panter's then relationship and Squire's marriage fell apart, though Brodie remained ­sufficiently close to be the first to email congratulations this week. They married in 1994.

Squire says that working together as a couple has huge advantages.

"We have great shorthand. We have our Richard and Judy moments. But we can have a completely honest conversation over the muesli in the morning and agree a strategy. The downside is you can't leave your work at the front door."

The couple each see three or four performances a week but often different ones to share the workload and keep up the contacts with producers and performers.

Says Panter: "Last night we were both working until 10, 11pm, 12 in different places and that isn't unusual. I'm not complaining but it's all-consuming. Our kids are attuned to the prominence of work."

They live in an Arts and Crafts-style house in West Byfleet, Surrey, with an acre of garden which was originally designed by the great Gertrude Jekyll and if they ever had a moment they would restore it.

Today they have their own daughter, Kate, who is seven and an aspiring actress.

Dan is studying on a scholarship at McGill University at Montreal after a degree at Oxford, and Jenny has just left their home to live in a transitional house in Guildford for people with similar learning disabilities to her own.

"She's making fantastic progress," Squire says. They have a Hungarian nanny and Squire's mum moved down from Nottingham 10 years ago to live nearby. "You can't work full-time unless you've got a really good support network," says Squire.

Ask what they do when they are not working and it sounds remarkably like work. Squire serves on the national board of Arts Council England and is vice chairman of the Dance Umbrella organisation.

"We don't produce dance," she protests at the suggestion it is a busman's holiday.

They have "a bolthole" in Cornwall and a bunch of friends with whom they go to see old-style rock stars such as Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and the Rolling Stones.

The Rockers Reunited includes Dyke and his wife Sue, Times Literary Supplement editor Peter Stothard and his novelist wife Sally Emerson, and assorted friends, including the actor Michael Pennington.

Dyke is threatening to sack Squire as social secretary because she has been so busy she failed to organise tickets for Fleetwood Mac.Apart from each other — Panter calls his wife "my soul mate" — theatre remains their great love.

Squire speaks passionately about the benefits of ­publicity from television reality shows such as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? which found Connie Fisher for The Sound of Music.

Panter stresses the enormous economic benefit ­created by ­theatre which is second on every visitor's list to London after ­heritage.

With The Lyceum and the Apollo Victoria Theatre now under their belt in London, they may finally be on the verge of seeing economic benefit themselves and moving out of the league of the happily comfortably off.

It would be nice, they concede but they would not retire. Why do they do it? "It's that experience that happens every single night in every single ­theatre that we operate," Squire says. "It's magic."